Her boyfriend was back in town, and she was all hot and bothered.
Overnight, the BMW had vanished and the Jetta that my mom had sold my sister after Birch was born had materialized in the driveway. Delia didn’t say anything about the switch, so I didn’t ask. The inside of the Jetta reeked of cigarettes. Delia spritzed on some perfume that smelled like window cleaner, shook her hair out of the ponytail, and reapplied the plum lipstick that she had wiped off for the shoot with Roger that had evidently taken place before I even woke up. My sister may not have been a zombie, but she definitely didn’t sleep.
“I think you should take Roger up on his offer,” she said.
“Really, because I think you should stop taking Roger up on his ‘offers,’ or whatever you two are calling that movie of his. He doesn’t even know what he’s shooting. Why would you do this? He’s an idiot. Haven’t you figured that out yet? He probably just wishes he were Charles Manson. Did you know that if a girl wore glasses, Manson would break them because he thought they should all be ‘natural’? He wasn’t just a psychopath, he was an asshole. Who cares why anyone wanted to listen to him?”
My sister broke it down for me like she was some mafia boss. “I’m not saying you should care about Charles Manson, I’m saying it’s a good business opportunity. Do you know they’ve hired television writers as young as seventeen? It’ll be a great credit for you when the film gets released. Roger is going places. We stopped sleeping together at least a year before we broke up, not that it’s any of your business. He thinks he might like men. Okay? You happy now?”
I wanted to say “Ewwwww,” not because of the men part, but because it was my sister and Roger and ewwwwwwwwwww. The thought of the two of them having sex was scarring, then I wondered if maybe she was just dating our mother, but in reverse, which was doubly scarring. Third-degree-psychic-trauma scarring.
“So if it’s so innocent, why can’t you tell your new boyfriend?”
“Dex? You don’t know men at all, do you, Anna?”
“Am I supposed to?”
Delia’s phone was ringing and she answered in a completely different voice from the one she’d been using. Good morning, sunshine.
“Hey, honey, yup, we’re on our way. Okay, I’ll pick some up but they’re poison and you know it. Love you too.” She clicked off. “Keep your eye out for Doughnut Dynasty; it’s coming up on the right.”
“Actual doughnuts? Fried with real sugar?”
“You’ll like Dex. You both have the palate of five-year-olds.”
We pulled into Doughnut Dynasty, and Delia ordered a half dozen of the daily selection at the drive-through: one pink coconut, two chocolate sprinkles, what looked like a jelly or custard, a caramel pecan, and a Nutella banana.
“I’m just gonna have a chocolate sprinkle,” I said. “There are two of them.”
“Want to rephrase that as a question?”
“No.”
The minute I ate the doughnut, I wanted all five more. I wanted a dozen, all to myself, in some closet where I didn’t have to hear about what they cost or how many empty calories they had in them.
“Ohmigod, please tell me you’ve at least tried these.” I was shaking down the napkin for any sprinkles I might have missed. They were that delicious.
“Sugar makes my face swell.”
“Sugar makes my face smile.” I was practically salivating at the thought of chocolate. Since Birch was born, my mom didn’t even notice if I ate brownies for breakfast. Maybe my sister was right, maybe I was a sugar junkie.
“And then you’ll crash and complain about how tired you are all afternoon.”
“Do you talk this way to Dex?”
“Dex lives on sugar.” Delia honked at the too-slow driver in front of us. “He never crashes because he’s completely addicted. Sugar is as toxic as any poison.”
“It’s not that toxic. I remember when you used to drink Mountain Dews on the way to drop me off at school. You weren’t, like, dying or anything.”
“But my skin was terrible. It’s your body, Anna,” she said. “And I’m only concerned because I want you to be your very best self while I’m at work.”
“You’re not taking me with you?”
“This week you’re going to Dex’s work.”
“Okay, so pretend that I’ve forgotten everything you’ve told me about Dex. Who is he and what does he do again?”
“See, I knew you weren’t listening. Was that so hard to admit?”
Yes, I thought, because it is a lie. I couldn’t hear something she never said.
“Well, where to start—he’s biracial, but probably whiter than I am.”
While Delia was equal opportunity about the BMWs she would borrow, when it came to actual dating, frat-boy white was last year’s color. In high school, she was strictly interested in black guys. She found the one Nigerian exchange student to take to prom. She once broke up with a perfectly nice biracial kid from the suburbs because he was “too white.” I think Roger slipped in because he had an accent and wore eye makeup on a semi-regular basis. By sheer virtue of his awesome command of Euro-weird, she must have overlooked the pasty glow of his flesh. Never mind that she herself had a lack of pigment rivaled by the walking dead. If I could have rolled my eyes, Exorcist-style, into the back of my skull, I would have.
“But he can’t be whiter than you because you’re actually white.”
“Ha-ha,” she said. “You’ll like him. He’s a writer.”
“Roger is a writer,” I said.
“I know, I know,” she said. “You hate Roger. But he’s not a writer like Roger is a writer. He writes for Chips Ahoy!”
It is a miracle that I didn’t spit my doughnut onto her dashboard.
“You mean Chips Ahoy! with the Taylor twins? Seriously?”
She nodded her head, and we both started laughing at the same time.
“That is the worst show in the history of the world,” I said.
Chips Ahoy! with Josh and Jeremy Taylor was a show about two very rich teenagers named Dan and Mickey Chip. For unknown reasons, they’re traveling the world on a yacht with their butler, trying to find their parents, who have been lost at sea. And somehow they’ve brought friends along. It might have been the single stupidest show in the history of television. I’ll bet even six-year-olds across America have turned their televisions off in disgust.
“How is that show even on television?” I said. “And how did you meet this guy?”
“At a movie,” she said. “And he knows the show is terrible. He’s working on his own pilot. The show pays really well. He’s actually quite funny.”
This is where I can never really trust Delia. Because she would talk about Roger’s student film, saying, “It’s actually quite deep,” when the only thing deep about Roger was his voice.
“Well his show isn’t.”
“Be polite,” she said.
My sister made a sharp right into the garage of a cardboard box of a four-story condo building that took up the entire city block. After she parked, Delia grabbed the box of doughnuts, checked her makeup one more time in the car mirror, and directed me to walk at a clip toward the elevator. “And remember, if he asks about last week, there was no Roger. Got it?”
“And I’m the family asshole?”
“No one’s an asshole, Anna.”
We rode the elevator to the fourth floor and walked to the last apartment on the left, 427. The door was cracked and a television was on extra loud in the living room, running classic movies. Marilyn Monroe in her fat phase was leaning over some crazy-looking sailor and fogging up his glasses. And not watching TV, but leaning over the breakfast bar eating an extra-large bowl of Cap’n Crunch, was Dex, who looked less like an LA writer than any boyfriend my sister had ever had.
“Boo,” my sister said, handing him the box of doughnuts.
“I missed you,” he said, and slapped my sister’s ass like they were in a relationship where she was capable of being fun. She mo
ved his hand around her waist.
“This is my sister, Anna.”
“Cool,” he said, nodding his head. “How’s it going, Anna?”
I shrugged my shoulders like I had never met a boy before, like I was an unsocialized troll straight from Middle-Earth. Dex was about eight million times better-looking that most of the men my sister dated. He had a close-cropped ’do, almost bald with just a shadow of hair, and he was tall. Taller than Delia in her stiletto boots, so I’d say six foot two, easy, and slim but muscular. He had one of those superhero square jaws, and light brown eyes, and when he smiled the left side of his face dimpled. His teeth were spaced a little bit apart in front, and he wore a “Too Many Rich Crackers” T-shirt, with a box of faux Ritz crackers on it. I could totally, totally, totally understand why Chips Ahoy! was not a factor in the dating decision. He could have written in crayons, and I would have been like, “Go, Delia!”
“So you’re a writer?” I finally said.
“I am,” he said. “I just got back from Hungary, helping a friend with a documentary he’s doing on the local music scene. Flying back into LA, it’s a different earth.”
My sister leaned over his kitchen counter, running her fingers over the tops of the doughnuts.
“You know you want one,” Dex said in a voice that was probably reserved for when little sisters were out of the room. “Do it.”
“Poison.” She closed the top. “I can’t even look at it.”
Dex mouthed She lies at me and I whispered, “I know.” If he only knew the half of it.
“They’re starting the summer season of Chips this week, and Dex said you’ll be fine on the set, better than watching me do my herpes audition.” Delia smiled her most commercial, plastic smile and made a Wheel of Fortune swipe over her mouth and lady parts. “Herpes. It’s not just for ugly people anymore.”
“Is that what you’re supposed to say?” Dex nearly spit out his doughnut. His third doughnut.
“Of course not, but they should, right? I think they need to rebrand the herp, not make prettier commercials for some drug. I mean, it’s just mouth sores on your ass, right? There are worse things in the world. It needs a better name. You’re the writer. Suggestions?”
“Ass pox?”
“At least that sounds edgy,” Delia said. “‘Herpes’ sounds like something a really dirty Muppet would get.”
Around Dex, my sister was a little less fake, a little more like the Delia I grew up with, goofy, even. She said that she’d met him when they were both stuck in line waiting to see the opening of Three Girls to the Left, a gag-worthy romantic comedy about a sports reporter and a wannabe cheerleader who keep meeting each other at the same basketball games. I’m not even kidding. Delia had three lines as “Bitchy Cheerleader,” and Dex had worked on one of the rewrites. They were both ashamed to be seeing the film in the first place, since the party line in LA is that no one ever watches their own stuff. I imagined them as two chimps who’d caught each other looking in the mirror and decided it was awesome. At any rate, Dex bought Delia some Twizzlers, and she knew she liked him because she ate half the pack, even though she made sure to let me know that she wound up with a stomachache later that night. All of this I had learned on the elevator ride to Dex’s apartment, though she swore she’d told me before.
“Are we allowed to talk like this around your sister?”
“Please,” Delia said. “She’s fifteen. It’s the new thirty-seven, in case you haven’t kept up.”
“I have heard of herpes.” I tried to be deadpan, and got a real smile from Dex.
“Speaking of,” she said. “Gotta get the children home.”
“I don’t wanna,” I whined. “Please, can I stay with you guys? Please, please, please?”
“I lied. Fifteen is the new two and a half. I haven’t seen my man in a month. Look homeward, little angel.” She pointed toward the door and Dex didn’t object.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Dex said. “We’re gonna be running buddies this summer.”
“But…”
Delia had already opened the door, but she waited for a moment. “But what?”
I wanted to say, But what about the note? What about the fact that you’re going to leave me in some house where someone’s branding you “Whore” in their shaky, serial-killer handwriting and taping it to your door? I am not a whore and would prefer not to be confused for one in your absence. I don’t know how to tell a sex maniac Sorry, come back later, because I’m pretty sure that sex maniacs are kind of like impulse shoppers—in a pinch, they’ll take whatever happens to be around.
But I wasn’t supposed to have seen the note, and I would have bet real money that Dex wasn’t supposed to know about it, so I was just going to have to double-lock the doors, sleep with a phone by my head, and accept my fate.
“But nothing,” I said.
5
When we got back to Delia’s house, my mom called. She still phoned me every night, mostly to remind me about something she’d left off her laundry list of complaints: to tell me that my dad was going to have my head when he got back from Mexico, to ask me if I had a job yet, to bore me with more Internet blather about the importance of taking responsibility for my actions. She always signed off by reminding me that I wasn’t on vacation, that she hoped I knew that I still had a paper to write. I was ready to tell her that I was going to be researching the Manson murders instead of working on my project, just to see if I could hear her overheat from Atlanta, but her voice sounded tired when Delia handed me the phone.
“Is your sister there? Could you put me on speakerphone?”
My sister was walking around her apartment, stuffing clothes into a gym bag, makeup, underwear from her special sexy drawer.
“You want to listen to the sound of Delia getting ready to go screw her boyfriend?”
Delia threw a pair of underwear at my head. So gross.
“Please, Anna. This really isn’t a good time.”
“For me either.”
I handed the phone to Delia, and after brief hellos, I could hear my mom take a deep breath from her bedroom. The air purifier rumbled in the background and Birch was saying, “Dis, dis, dis,” over and over again. He must have been rummaging through her jewelry or tearing books off the wall.
“Okay,” she said. “I want to start by saying that I don’t want either of you to panic, because this is going to sound like bad news, but it’s all going to be okay. A few weeks ago I had to go in for a mammogram, and they saw something that made them nervous. It should have made me nervous too, but I had other things on my mind.”
My sister looked at me. I kept looking at the phone. My mom continued. “I truly didn’t think anything of it, because I’m nursing and I’ve had clogged ducts before, but they wanted the area biopsied.”
I watched my sister while we listened. She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked slowly back and forth, silent.
“And it’s cancer. There’s no other way to say it. But they caught it early, and it’s very treatable. They won’t know for sure how to proceed until they’ve removed what they found, but the doctor assured me that we’d caught it early and treatment would…” Her voice wavered. “It should work. I have surgery next week and then some chemo to follow up, and it should all be gone by the end of the summer.”
After the word “cancer” it was like I didn’t hear anything else she said. A low, radio-static buzz starting to build in the back of my head, and my mouth felt sticky and walled off.
“Oh my god,” I said. “I want to come home. I can help with Birch.”
“Anna,” she said. Another long pause. Another deep breath.
“So what’s the prognosis,” my sister said, “long-term?”
“Long-term I should be great. I don’t have the gene. There’s no way of knowing why this happened, and I”—now she was starting to cry—“I’ll feel okay when it’s all taken care of. When they have it out. It’s hard knowing this is inside of me.”
“And I’ve been able to breastfeed for over a year. I’m trying just to be grateful for that.”
“What about me? Can I come back?”
“Anna,” she said, and it was her no-nonsense voice all of a sudden. “I just—we don’t know how cancer works. I don’t know what caused this. I don’t know what would make it come back or make it spread, but I do know that I can’t have any more stress in my life than I already have.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Delia was staring at the phone on the living room floor like how those priests in horror movies look at calm little girls who have the devil inside of them. Waiting.
“I just—” she said again. “I can’t take the risk that having you here might make the cancer worse.”
My sister looked like she’d swallowed poison.
“What?” I said. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t catch my breath.
“That’s it,” Delia said. “Conversation over. I’m so sorry about your news, but we can talk about this tomorrow. Good night, Cora. And thanks for handling this in such an adult fashion. She’s not old enough to handle your bullshit, you get that, right? You get that you’re the adult?”
One of them must have disconnected because my sister tossed the phone across the room and then picked up her gym bag and slammed it against the floor.
“Please don’t be mad at me,” I said.
“Oh, Anna. I’m not mad at you.”
She sat down across from me and collapsed into herself. I tended to think of my sister as a big person—tall shoes, wide smile, loud voice. But she was probably a hundred pounds soaking wet, and she looked kind of like a pill bug on her sofa, rolling into herself, almost disappearing.
“Don’t cry,” Delia said. “Please don’t let her make you cry. Please. It’s not worth it. She’s like a selfish two-year-old. With cancer, yes, but, Jesus, God Almighty, is it so hard, such a terrible challenge, for anyone in this family to be normal?”
“Do you think it’s my fault?” I could barely even say the words.
American Girls Page 5